1164: Home Alone

Home Alone is a popular 1990 film in which the child protagonist Kevin McCallister (portrayed by Macaulay Culkin) is accidentally left alone in his house when his family goes on vacation, and has to thwart a burglary all by himself. In the movie, McCallister comes up with a variety of ingenious traps and schemes (usually involving jury-rigged toys and household items) to harass, injure and eventually incapacitate the burglars, which was the film's defining feature. The film spawned a series of sequels (4 as of 2012, the first of which also starred Culkin) all with a similar premise to the original.

The scene depicted in the strip is an adaptation of an iconic scene from the first movie (used heavily in advertising) where McCallister hangs two paint cans in strings above the staircase, and let them swing down to hit the burglars in the face.

On a more general level, the films revolves around the classical trope with an underdog defeating a much stronger opponent (the burglars), through his own ingenuity. To reboot the franchise would be to begin it fresh, with some new ideas, ignoring the previous continuity. This became common with the present century. Examples. Rebooting Home Alone with "reversed" ages, so that an adult protagonist uses his skills to harm children burglars, would obviously spoil the basic idea, and make a very bad family comedy. On the upside, Culkin could again play the protagonist, and get his career rebooted. Bad as such a movie would be, joking about this luckily makes good black comedy.

Discussion

Don't you think he also makes a reference to Django Unchained? Because it looks last the last scene of Django Unchained, which is a soft of "reboot" of Django, starring an old Franco Nero. 217.162.253.103 11:40, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

This made me laugh more than it should have. 2.120.136.128 08:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I know. I saw the panel and thought "Okay, that's interesting," and then moused over. Very nice. 76.122.5.96 10:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

The only place this movie would work is at a Rube-Goldberg convention. Where all attendees are dads. 220.224.246.97 17:55, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Could that reboot suggestion also be a comment on the reboot of the Star Trek series where all the characters we know and love now never existed in that universe? Maybe some series should not be rebooted. Katya (talk)

"reboot of the Star Trek series where all the characters we know and love now never existed" - which reboot was that? Pretty sure Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty and all the rest of the crew were there in the reboot... TheHYPO (talk) 17:10, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I think Katya's implying that she likes some of the Next-Generation or maybe Deep Space Nine characters. It's not clear from the continuity of the rebooted Star Trek movies whether Picard, Riker, Data, LaForge, Sisko, Dax, O'Brien, Garak etc. also still exist in the "new" (rebooted) timeline, since even if they did, they wouldn't be around at the time of Kirk, Spock and Bones. It's entirely possible that the timeline changes shown in the new film would lead to a universe in which these characters are never born or never enter Starfleet. That would be a shame! 71.201.53.130 19:16, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

No, Katya meant what she said. In order to preserve the continuity established by the original series' canon, the rebooted film (mild SPOILER ALERT!) saw the villain and one of the main characters travel back in time, altering characters' backstories and interactions with each other. While therefore all of the events of the original series still "happened," the unfortunate side effect is that all of the characters' histories were/will be overwritten by the events of the new timeline -- to say nothing of the "future" series yet to come in the Star Trek universe. As an example of the disparity, Wikipedia splits the Star Trek universe into its separate timelines in their template boxes. --71.229.88.206 03:00, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

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